


Photographic Memory

by Pi (Rhea)



Category: Loveless
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-23
Updated: 2011-11-23
Packaged: 2017-10-26 11:34:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/282563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rhea/pseuds/Pi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rituska takes pictures to make memories. Soubi begins to understand the camera.itsuka/Soubi Written for kink bingo, wildcard, "photography". Nothing graphic, but Ritsuka is, of course, underage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Photographic Memory

It's not surprising that Ritsuka takes pictures of this too. Soubi remembers the first time they met, Ritsuka taking his hand, _"Let's make memories"_. Soubi made memories by kissing, Ritsuka made memories by taking pictures. _"If there are no pictures then it didn't happen"._

It had seemed strange to Soubi, at the time. Soubi's memories were tactile things, the scars on his back, a name carved in skin, the softness of Ritsuka's lips beneath his own, the metal butterflies in his ears. They were things one could touch, remembered with fingertips. But Ritsuka had said that photographs were more than proof.  
"If I see it this way, I know it's really, it's more real, more beautiful. It's art." he'd said, his tail twitching nervously. He kept his eyes lowered, scanning through pictures of Soubi smelling the flowers of the rose garden, and then Soubi thought he might have understood.

Soubi knows art, the swirl of paint beneath his brush is how he captures beauty, deals with emotion, pinned butterflies. And so he waits calmly, watching Ritsuka blushing bright red behind his camera, fiddling with the zoom. Soubi wonders if Ritsuka is cropping the picture to the fall of his hair loose over bare shoulders, or just his face, fully eliminating nakedness. But then Ritsuka turns the camera, and Soubi knows that expression. It is part awe at captured beauty, framed in by a brush, or a lense, and mixed with what is becoming gradually more familiar these days: desire.

The shutter clicks, a snick that doesn't cover the hitch in Ritsuka's breathing. The camera is lowered from his eyes, and he holds it gently, still aimed at Soubi, but no longer looking at the screen. Ritsuka walks slowly forward and Soubi waits. He feels his responding desire thrumming through his veins, combining with the excitement of being Ritsuka's pallet. Ritsuka sketches his fingers across Soubi's collar bone, glancing off the jagged scarring of the name etched there.

Ritsuka subtly shifts his arm, rolls him forward slightly then steps back again, camera coming up. The shutter click makes the old name into a new image. Ritsuka is pinning him in a way perhaps more profound than the scars on his back or the pain of his false name. This is what Soubi wants, and Ritsuka holds that image. He will always hold it in his minds eye, this exact moment in multiple copies spilling from his hands.

Soubi's seen Ritsuka's walls. They are series of pictures: Yuiko, Yayoi and his teachers, his therapists, occasionally family, and always, always Soubi. Soubi imagines those walls filled with his face, his form, the way Ritsuka sees him. Some morning Soubi will slide open the balcony screen door and enter Ritsuka's room to be surrounded by the love Ritsuka feels for him. Perhaps it is not fully voiced, but still captured in the way the sunlight curves across his face, the way his hands hold a brush, and the million little expressions Ritsuka automatically snaps with his camera. All held and cherished. Soubi shivers at the thought, and Ritsuka takes another picture.


End file.
